Category Archives: Inflammation

Inflammation and cancer: Sharpin at the sharp end

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Professor Henning Walczak

Professor Henning Walczak and his team have made an important discovery about inflammation.

It’s taken six years, the development of a new experimental technique and a move from Germany to London, but an international team of scientists, including some funded by Cancer Research UK, have finally uncovered a vital piece in the scientific puzzle that links inflammation to diseases such as cancer and arthritis.

Publishing their results in Nature this week, Professor Henning Walczak‘s team at Imperial College London describe how a protein called Sharpin helps to switch between ‘good’ signals in cells – which are important for responding to disease – and ‘bad’ signals, which lead to inflammation and cell death.

Here’s a short audio clip of Professor Walczak discussing his new research – and below that, our in-depth analysis of what the researchers found:

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Link to transcript
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NCRI lecture – Good cop, bad cop: the immune system and breast cancer spread

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As we’ve mentioned before, there’s a stack of evidence that chronic inflammation – directed by white blood cells – plays a role in the development and spread of some types of cancer.

For a start, plenty of molecular studies have found that the chemicals involved in controlling inflammation also seem to be involved in cancer.

Secondly, population studies have linked conditions like Crohn’s disease, asbestosis, H. pylori infection, and hepatitis all have a link to cancer.  In addition, people who regularly take anti-inflammatory drugs like aspirin have a reduced risk of the disease.

And crucially in this story, studies of cancer samples have revealed that tumours are studded with white blood cells that are known to be involved in inflammation. It now seems that the more white cells there are in a patient’s tumour, the more likely the cancer is to spread, and the worse the patient’s outlook.

But white blood cells are supposed to be the good guys – the body’s policemen. Could they also be aiding and abetting cancer spread? To try to find out, US researcher Professor Lisa Coussens has been studying the role of white blood cells in cancer for over a decade.

Her lab at the University of California, San Francisco, have found that certain specific types of white blood cell seem to shift from playing ‘good cop’ to playing ‘bad cop’ inside tumours, helping cancer cells escape like a corrupt sheriff might let a killer out of jail.

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More on inflammation and bowel cancer

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A diagram of the bowelsJust a quick one. We’ve written before about the links between inflammation and cancer, and couched a lot of what we’ve written in all sorts of caveats like ‘may’ and ‘might’.

Well, last week, a few more of those caveats fell away, and the picture became just a little bit clearer.

Scientists in the US have, for the first time, demonstrated that chronic inflammation leads to pre-cancerous problems, DNA damage and, ultimately, bowel and stomach cancer, amongst mice who have been bred to have sluggish ‘DNA repair mechanisms’.

This is a really important finding. Continue reading →

Aspirin’s a ‘wonder-drug’ – but can it prevent cancer?

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This is a bit of a long one, but we felt it was important to get it all down in one place… particularly as this is a topic that pops up frequently in the news. As ever, we’re keen for your feedback – so let us know if you think it’s too long…

A hand holding some pills

Can aspirin prevent cancer?

In recent years, there have been frequent reports that our old friend aspirin, the over-the-counter painkiller and anti-coagulant, appears to be able to prevent cancer.

The most recent one was in April, when there was widespread coverage of research looking at breast cancer rates amongst women who regularly took so-called ‘non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs’ – NSAIDs – the class of drugs to which aspirin belongs.

This research made the news because it suggested that aspirin might prevent the formation of a common type of breast cancer – ‘oestrogen-positive’ breast cancer.

In fact there’s quite a lot of evidence building up now that NSAIDs might indeed play a role in stopping, or at least slowing down, the development of cancer – at least under certain circumstances. But does this mean that doctors will one day be able to prescribe a simple pill to reduce your risk of cancer, like they do for people at risk of heart disease?

As usual, it’s a not quite that simple, so let’s have a look at what the science actually shows.

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Interleukin 6 – no innocent bystander

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The structure of IL-6

If someone was repeatedly found near the scene of a crime, you’d expect the police would, at some point, begin to suspect that they might be more than just an innocent bystander.

And so it turns out, clumsy crime analogy aside, that a molecule involved in promoting inflammation – the body’s natural defence against injury and infection – might actually be a key player in cancer development.

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